Court Order Must to release Monetary Board Minutes

Members of the Monetary Board of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka and of its Secretariat have no authority to release minutes of its meetings to any outsiders (excluding public announcements) unless the Court so orders, a senior Central Bank official told.

“The MB secretariat is the main custodian of all MB minutes.

According to MB requirements, they have the power to issue relevant MB orders, instructions or circulars to relevant parties. Other than that, no other outsiders (other than by a Court order) were entitled to obtain or inspect MB records,” he said in response to the Ceylon Today query.

According to the related page one story in our issue today, text messages retrieved from Arjun Aloysius’s mobile phone by the Presidential Commission probing the Central Bank Bonds scam, mention the ‘Prime Minister’ and ‘R.K’ , the Presidential Commission of Inquiry probing the Central Bank Treasury Bond scandal heard on Wednesday. The Commission heard that 8,600 pages of documents filled with details had been downloaded from Aloysius’ mobile phone. Among them were several that the Attorney General’s Department mentioned two people referred to variously as Hon. PM and RK’ or ‘PM or Hon. Ravi K’. These references were in text messages received by Aloysius and discussed the obtaining of minutes of the Monetary Board.

Additional Solicitor General Dappula de Livera examined Karunanayake who is currently Foreign Affairs Minister and asked him about the messages.

The Minister responded by denying knowledge of these text messages claiming that he did not know that RK was a reference made to him. Among the mobile phone information presented to the Commission, which was only made available to the attorneys representing the Minister and Aloysius, were two text messages which referred to these individuals.

One such text message sent to Aloysius by his Executive Secretary Steve Samuel reminds Aloysius to obtain a copy of a certain Monetary Board meeting from ‘PM or RK’. (IG)